Creating Your Buyer Persona

When you first start building leads, the first and most important thing you need to do is to identify your buyer persona. This is what will allow you to find your ‘cold leads’, which are the first point of contact for your marketing. A cold lead is someone who has never heard from you before but who you have the option of contacting. This might be an email address you’ve bought, or someone who has just now landed on your site. What makes them a lead at all, is the fact that they fit your demographic. This is the kind of person that is likely to want to buy your product and they fit precisely within your target demographic.

If you can find that kind of person, that then means that you stand a much better chance of converting them from a cold lead to a warm lead – of getting them to give you permission to contact them. But you can’t know if someone fits into your target demographic until you know precisely what that target demographic is. And this is where your ‘buyer persona’ comes into play.

What is a Persona? Essentially, a persona is a profile of the kind of person who precisely matches your target demographic. That means they should be the right age and the right sex. They should have the right income and they should have hobbies/interests or a career that aligns with what you’re selling. This is then what will allow you to target your ads to acquire those cold leads. You do this with PPC advertising, or by advertising in the right social media groups. A persona goes further than this though and actually means that you are literally profiling your leads as though they were a real person. You need to think about their interests, their hobbies and even their dreams. Once you know what the dream of your persona is, you can then start marketing to them much better by thinking about your value proposition. How are you going to make life better for that person? What problems that they deal with regularly are you going to solve for them?

Your persona will also tell you where you can find your readers. What other interests do they have for instance? You know they like your niche but perhaps they are also likely to enjoy cooking? In which case, what other opportunities does this open up? Knowing your persona will even help you to create posts that are much more engaging because they speak directly to the kind of reader who is likely to be looking at them!

Explaining Leads in Terms of DatingUnderstanding the lead lifecycle, lead generation and ‘lead scoring’ is one of the best things you can possibly do for your business if you want to increase your turnover, revenue and profits while also increasing the brand loyalty and trust you get for your business. The problem is that too many people don’t think about leads and instead focus just on sales. They believe the aim of their website is to convert as many visitors as possible and to maximize their sales. The irony is that this actually ends up driving away a lot of potential customers and actually reducing their profits significantly. Why is that? Because people don’t like to be sold to. And the best way to understand this is to think about it in terms of dating…

Why Sales Leaves People ColdWhen someone visits your website, whether through SEO, AdSense or any other means, they are essentially going to be cold leads. That means that they fall into your demographic and they are potentially going to be interested in your niche but they have at no point demonstrated any particular loyalty to your brand and nor have they given you permission to contact them and/or try to sell to them. When this happens and you try and sell, this is then going to feel pretty much like cold calling. They don’t know who you are, they have no need to trust you and here you are trying to get them to buy something from you. This is essentially the same thing as approaching a stranger in a bar and asking them to come home with you – there’s no pre-amble and it ends up coming across as rather rude. Ultimately, your chances of getting a positive response are much lower as a result!

How to Warm Them Up FirstThis is why it’s important to think about your lead lifecycle. Instead of trying to sell to cold leads, you’re trying to impress them with your value proposition, with the quality of information you’re giving away free and with the way your brand aligns with their values. When you do this, you create warm leads – people who have given you their contact details and invited you to contact them. In terms of dating, this is the equivalent of meeting someone you like in a bar, chatting to them for a while and demonstrating your good humor and then asking for a number. In the long term, the latter approach is likely to lead to a much better outcome for all parties involved…………………….